Cognitive Dissonance for Fundamenatlists

by leavingwt 128 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  SweetBabyCheezits

  Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure." - Mencken

  Were it not for the few who spoke up, driving incremental changes from one generation to the next, we might live in a very different world today. Of course, we still have a long way to go.
• 

  NewChapter

  Great quote Sweet. Actually it's profound. It was people like us that first questioned things like human sacrifice---and it is people like us that continue to question the accepted morals of the day. For everyone that scoffs at progressive thinkers---they should realize that they could be tied to an alter today if it hadn't been for our ilk.

  NC
• 

  SweetBabyCheezits
• 

  smiddy

  I bet Isaac never turned his back on Abraham again.

  smiddy
• 

  SweetBabyCheezits

  Cheeze, have I told you lately that I love you?

  Only once in the last hour, Beks. I was beginning to feel a little neglected.
• 

  snare&racket

  Sulla..... go read the verses, dont quote the verses I told you I didnt include.

  Either way, your deity is quite grim. You wont convince us otherwise. Thankfully he is make belief. Let loose the chains my friend x Life is good and ironically more moral. Doing good is all you have to do... ah but what is good? Nash theory dictates that what is good for the group is good for the individual. Easy....! Stoning for example, burning on altars, genocide, infanicide, rape, slavery, kidnap, incest.... these all go out the window. But keep worshiping the bearded cu*t responsible for such actions all you want. Your mental gymnastics may work for you.... but some of us are more interested in truth than personal appeasment... keep swinging on those monkey bars...

  Snare x :P x
• 

  Sulla

  Your suggestion that we would all offer child sacrifices if we lived a 2-3 millienia back is quaint but I would like to point out that, unlike you, many of us on this forum are among a minority today, and proudly stand apart from the 2+ billion who worship a 2k year old corpse and live by a bronze age morals.

  Yes, life an an atheist in the 21st century American context is such challenge. Exactly the sort of bold moral action that makes it quite certain that, were you living in Carthage back in the day, you'd have had a) the moral insight to object to the practice and b) the courage to stand against it. This is pretty much the definition of moral preening, thanks for being exhibit A.

  So who knows? Maybe we would be among the few back then who would've rejected the "the thinking and attitudes" that pontificating f*cks like you would've willingly adopted. But I understand if that's beyond your grasp.

  Charming. Let me get this straight: I say that, were we living in that culture we'd have done the same thing. You say that you are such a tower of moral courage that you would have stood up to them Moabites sacrificing babies to Moloch and called them out. And I'm a "pontificating fuck"? What a brave boy you are, SBC, breaking bad on the internet. Particularly dumb, as it happens, but very very brave. And good to see you fan club likes it, too.
• 

  Sulla

  snare, I argued on the "Jeptha" thread that the account really was a human sacrifice, for what it's worth. But my point is simply that, were we part of that time and place and part of a culture that practiced human sacrifice, we would all have gone along with the practice. The reason why I say that is because, outside of the Jews, I don't know that we read of anybody in the region who had a problem with the practice. For whatever reason, the practice was compelling enough that Jewish kings would sacrifice their own children!

  So there really isn't any reason except moral preening to suppose that any of us would have taken some sort of heroic stand against burning babies to Molech or whoever. Indeed, I don't think that, except for the Jewish opposition, we have any contemporaneous condemnation of the practice. So, if you want to say the OT God is mean and nasty, that's fine. Were you alive at the time, you probably would have thought the Jewish God was a bit soft, compared to the others.

  As for your comments about Nash: I've done a considerable amount of game theory and I am not at all convinced that a major implication of that discipline is that what is good for the group is good for the individual. Counter examples are too easy to find for that to be the case.
• 

  Lazarus

  LWT, nice one.

  Sulla vs. The Rest:

  All of us, with no exception, would under given circumstances have participated in human sacrifice practices. To think you were the great exception is self-deception.

  Sulla <-> The Rest 1:0

  To compare the jewish god vs. other gods is like comparing Hitler to Stalin. Even if you came to the conclusion that Hitler was worse than Stalin, it doesn't make a big difference, does it?

  Sulla <-> The Rest 1:1

  Nash doesn't say "what is good for the group is good for the individual". Often the opposite is true.

  Sulla <-> The Rest 2:1
• 

  NewChapter

  Interesting. Soft in comparison. . . so it's all relative then. This god does not have to actually be good----it only needs to be a bit better. The lesser of many evils? Okay. The people of Mesopatamia were conditioned to serve brutal gods. They resided between the Tigris and Euphrates, two unforgiving and unpredictable rivers. Naturally their gods were both life givers and killers--like their rivers. The Nile on the other hand was a gentle and predictiable river. There is no sound evidence that human sacrifice was practiced in Egypt. There are hypotheses, but it is generally accepted that this was not a part of the religion.

  All of this makes sense because religion is regional. The Jewish god grew out of the Mesopatamian religion, and the Law of Moses grew out of the Law Code of Hammurabi. We really should expect a particularly violent god to emerge from these people. Why was he slightly softer? Perhaps that 400 years the Jews spent in Egypt injected some ideas. And it should be noted, that while many cultures did practice human sacrifice, many did not. So it's not even as though this was an original thought---although the Christian god did practice human sacrifice.

  Now we understand the people of the day. We understand their morality and what it was based on. Brutal environments produce brutal gods, and brutal gods produce brutal people. As interesting as that is, it's not really the issue.

  When people were at the whim of their environment with little understanding of how natural phenomena worked, they created their answers. It gave them a sense of control. Appease this god, and maybe we won't have drought or flooding. But what about today? Knowledge is all around us. Information pours from our computer. We don't need to burn witches anymore, because we understand bacteria and have found the real cause of plague.

  So we should excuse ancient people for practices that appear quite brutal to us today. They processed the world the only way they knew how. Many of the choices they made were quite logical, given their knowledge. But what about today? Why do people continue to embrace a violent god that practices human sacrifice? Most would agree that human sacrifice, genocide, witch burning are wrong, but they cling to a god that grew out of a culture where these things were par for the course.

  And so back to the OP----it's cognitive dissonance.